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ivan.ukr
Asked: 2021-08-10 21:04:05 +0800 CST

How to kill a process running under SYSTEM account in the Windows Server?

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I have a server with Windows Server 2008 R2 and a service process (our custom service) running on it under SYSTEM account. A service has presumably hanged and I wanted to stop it. I tried stopping via Management Console "Services" snap-in, but it didn't help, service process still running, despite in the Management Console it is already marked as not running. Is there a way to kill it from the command line? Note that service runs under the SYSTEM account. I have full administrative privileges on the server.

I have tried pskill from console with elevated privileges (just as pskill PID), but it didn't do the job: it has reported that process killed, but I still see it in the Task Manager.

Taskkill also doesn't help:

C:\>taskkill /f /im myservice.exe
ERROR: The process "myservice.exe" with PID 1268 could not be terminated.
Reason: There is no running instance of the task.

But the process still visible in the Task Manager.

Update: Powerhell Stop-Process -Name myservice -Force also didn't work.

Any ideas how to really kill the process (except rebooting the server)?

windows windows-service windows-server-2008-r2 kill-process

1 Answers

  1. Download pstools and extract the downloaded zip file. There will be an exe file with name psexec.

    open cmd.exe/command prompt with run as admin option. There you type below command. "psexec.exe /s /i cmd.exe"

    It will launch one more console window with system user as current user. From there you can run whatever commands you want with system user access

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